A hunter on a former 272,000-acre West Texas cattle ranch stumbled upon a fossilized mammoth tusk.
The ranch manager was skeptical of the claim at first, thinking it was a stump, but brought the information to archaeologists at Sul Ross State University.
Texas was once a mammoth hot spot.
Can a hunting trip be considered successful if your biggest prize was already dead when you found it? What if it’s been dead for thousands of years? We’re asking for a hunter in West Texas, who went out in hopes of bringing home some venison and instead discovered a single mammoth tusk on an expansive 272,000-acre ranch in the Chihuahuan Desert near Big Bend National Park.
A hunter at the O2 Ranch came back to the ranch manager, Will Juett, with a photo rather than a 10-point buck. “I was skeptical when a deer hunter showed me a picture of what he thought was a fossil,” Juett said in a statement provided by Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas. “I figured it was likely just an old stump, but imagined how great it would be if he was right.”
Turns out, pretty great.
Juett worked with Bryon Schroeder and Erika Blecha, archaeologists at the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross, who in turn contacted a graduate student at the University of Kansas specializing in mammoth studies. With a couple more anthropology professors in tow, a team of five traveled to the ranch to see this mysterious object in the picture. It didn’t take long for experts to solve the mystery.
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“The tusk was located in the drainage area of a creek bed,” said Schroeder, the director of the center. “We realized pretty quickly there was not more to the skeleton, just an isolated tusk that had been separated from the rest of the remains.”
It took the team two days to plaster-jacket the tusk, using strips of plaster covered in burlap for protection, and to build a frame to transfer the find to the Sul Ross campus. The team said carbon dating results will be available within the next few months, ideally narrowing the date of the tusk to a 500-year range.
Mammoth finds aren’t wildly rare in Texas. As the Smithsonian reported, there’s even a Waco Mammoth National Monument, five acres of protected land established in Central Texas in 2015 to highlight the only known evidence of a nursery herd of Columbian mammoths that all died suddenly together in what researchers believe was a flash flood.
The Columbian mammoth was the most likely mammoth species populating what is now Texas. Related to the woolly mammoth, the Columbian variety—which could have formed when woolly mammoths mated with an unknown line of mammoths—stood taller, up to 13 feet in height at the shoulder, and weighed up to 20,000 pounds, according to the National Park Service. Less hairy than the woolly variety, the Columbian mammoth was prominent in the southern half of North America, which included Texas.
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The Columbian mammoth was an herbivore, so the tusks were often used to dig up plant roots or strip bark off trees. Of course, males used the tusks as weapons, especially in the fight over females. Experts believe mammoth populations died off with the conclusion of the last ice age, possibly anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
“Seeing that mammoth tusk just brings the ancient world to life,” Juett said. “Now, I can’t help but imagine that huge animal wandering around the hills on the O2 Ranch. My next thought is always about the people that faced those huge tusks with only a stone tool in their hand.”
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Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.